Google Talk and GMail Unicode Support

Due to my Turkish heritage, my name is riddled with non-ASCII-conforming characters.

The small letter "s" at the end of my middle name "Kurtulus" is actually a "ş", that is a small s with a cedilla.
It is pronounced like the Latin small letter "esh", the sound of it being described as voiceless postalveolar fricative, represented via ʃ in the IPA.

Both, the capital and small letters "i" in my last name, written "ı" for the small one, represent the Turkish alphabet's respective dotless letters, also known as close back unrounded vowel to the linguistic community, I suppose :)
The IPA uses the Latin letter "m" turned upside down ɯ to represent it.

Even though my German passport reads

Mustafa Kurtulus Isik

following the correct and intended spelling of my name should result in

Mustafa Kurtuluş Işık

Well did you know, that if you have to deal with such letters in your name, Google Talk and GMail won't leave you out in the rain? They support all the Unicode goodness you could ask for.

If for instance you feel like changing your GMail sender name, just go to Settings->Accounts->edit info and re-enter your name with the special characters.

You can use a UTF-8 character table to look up the four-digit hex code point encoding, which you should enter holding Ctrl+Shift on the keyboard. Upon entering the last of the digits, your desired special character will appear auto-magically.


If you lack the name, but not the desire to play around with this, why don't you go for a trademark sign ™ or an end of proof ∎ in your Google Talk status messages?

By the way this blogpost follows a marathon debugging session of open source code that I am in the process of reviving ... makes you do weird things ... ☻